Introduction

Team Group is a well-known Taiwanese hardware manufacturer with a long history of catering to the needs of enthusiasts and gamers from all over the globe. Their lineup includes DRAM memory and solid-state drives, and Team Group also offer various memory cards and USB thumb drives.



The Team Group G50 is designed to be a highly affordable value-oriented SSD that still ticks all the boxes: M.2 NVMe, PCIe 4.0 x4 and TLC NAND flash (not QLC). It is built using the Innogrit IG5220 controller that's been on the market for quite a while now and is also used on drives such as the ADATA Legend 840, HP FX900 and ADATA XPG Atom 50. The NAND flash is YMTC 128-layer 3D TLC. As expected for a value SSD, a DRAM cache chip is not installed, but the SSD will use up to 64 MB of system memory through the HMB (Host-Memory-Buffer) mechanism.

The Team Group G50 is available in capacities of 512 GB ($50), 1 TB ($60) and 2 TB ($105). The endurance is set to 325 TBW, 650 TBW and 1300 TBW respectively. Team Group includes a five-year warranty with the G50 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which is pretty much the standard these days, it doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the SSD controller and four flash chips. A DRAM cache is not available.


Team Group includes a heat spreader foil with their drive. While it's not a full-blown heatsink, it does help a little bit as our thermal measurements show.


Do note that the controller is lower in Z-Height than the flash chip next to it, so you have to press the foil down a bit. Do make sure to fully cover the (small) controller chip, as that's the main heat source of the SSD.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5220 RainierQX controller is an older controller design that's optimized for low-cost Gen 4 drives without DRAM and manufactured on a 12 nanometer production process.


The four flash chips are YMTC 128-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen